30 seconds away from a terror attack in Jaffa

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JAFFA, Israel — In my corner of south Jaffa, it didn’t start with the Iranian missiles. It started with gun shots, from a machine gun probably. A round of about 30 shots fired into the night, at what felt like the corner of my street.

I drew the blinds. It’s normal to hear gun shots in Jaffa. The local bike store owner was shot in the leg; the window at the nearby meat shop was shot out eight months ago. My friend’s good friend was shot in the arm by a hitman’s stray bullet. Rival gangs settling scores, but stay out of their business and they will stay out of yours.

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Fireworks are also common here, but the pop sounds Tuesday were regular and these ones were erratic, too fast. Then there was a second round, then a third. It definitely sounded like a machine gun, I told my daughter. My husband came up to check if the front door was locked.

The messages came quickly on the Jaffa Friends WhatsApp group: “Active shooting on the Boulevard. Stay inside.”

I wrote “pigua,” which means terror attack in Hebrew. My stepson, white faced and breathless, just came in from the road with the news. There was a terror attack 30 seconds away on Jerusalem Boulevard, he said. He beelined away from it and took the side roads home to us. He was to have met a student who had postponed the lesson by half an hour. Divine intervention?

I called my son’s friend’s mom and whispered to her so the kids wouldn’t hear. One suspect was on the loose. I told her to lock the doors. She kept the kids inside, the lights off, everything locked. She lives in a ground floor apartment in the trendy Noga neighbourhood, a possible escape route for terrorists.

Photos of the drama were soon available on the internet: The terrorists did indeed have machine guns, just like at the Nova festival.

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They were dressed in black and running around with machine guns, smiling at their kill on the Erlich Station platform, perhaps 200 metres from my house.

Dr. Paul Erlich, for whom the street and station are named, was a Jewish doctor who discovered the first antibiotic, and the first treatment for syphilis. He started the concept of chemotherapy and introduced the concept of a magic bullet.

The internet also had photos of dead bodies lying on the ground, on my very block. I thought about all the parents and kids I know who ride that train. My stomach turned. This is the train station where my daughter got off a few hours earlier and which my son took at 4:30 p.m. to see his friend in Noga.

We feel relatively safe in Jaffa because it’s a mixed city; we are Muslims, Christians and Jews all living together. I wouldn’t say in complete harmony or peace but there is a general sense of respect and tolerance here. I’ve been 25 years in Jaffa. Gun violence, violence against women and violence against Jews isn’t new.

The ambulance and police sirens started, followed mere minutes later by air raid sirens. We had been told to stay close to shelters and were now told the missiles were coming from Iran, and a direct hit could blow out a street block.

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I’d checked out an underground public shelter near us in the afternoon and asked my daughter to pack a bag with water and granola bars. She brought knitting and a book. And makeup for an apocalypse. Teen humour.

We could run to that shelter within 90 seconds of an attack. This time the missiles were going to be big. We couldn’t survive an attack on our house. We’d need to be underground. The gate to the shelter was locked. My husband said it would open automatically if needed. But with real time updates of terrorists now on the loose I wasn’t about to run into anyone’s machine gun in an underground shelter.

I wrote on the WhatsApp group: “I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

We don’t have a shelter but found an internal room, the laundry room, we figured was least likely to crumble. There were bottles of vodka, wine, bottles of paint thinner overhead. Suitcases. I told my daughter to put her head in the dryer like it’s a helmet. I motioned to my stepson to take the washing machine drum. It’s a front loader. We are confused. But understand this is something different. We are being attacked from inside and from outside. I think I need to go back to see my therapist, my daughter announced.

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There were booms; objects rattled around us. We hoped for the best.

By now friends had heard about the terror attackers in Jaffa and were checking in on us. My husband called his friend from the Mossad. He said lock your doors twice: The terrorist was still on the loose. We had put the dogs in the yard to bark away terrorists who might want to hide in our yard, but the sirens scared them and they were trying to get into the house.

We brought them to the laundry room with us.

Stay locked and safe, said the Canadian and American messengers in the WhatsApp group from Jaffa. I thought about the people of Kibbutz Kfar Aza who knew terrorists were within and above, and they weren’t safe at all in their safe rooms. I kicked myself for putting the kitchen knife and fire extinguishers back in their place. After October 7 there had been a feeling in Jaffa that this could happen to us. And now, maybe it was happening.

It had become personal. Machine guns on my daughter and son’s train? The one that they ride to tennis practice, to their friends? To her high-school where she writes songs about peace, and love and — now terror? How can anyone even this score?

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“4 civilians dead. 7 wounded. Both terrorists neutralized. I was right there. Scary,” writes one man on the WhatsApp group.

A friend joked about it being just before a Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanna, which lasts three days this year as it’s joined by Friday and the Sabbath. He sent a meme in Hebrew: “What the Iranians don’t know is that we’ve all got food ready for three days.”

Karin Kloosterman is an artist and writer living between Jaffa and Nipissing, Ont. She runs Green Prophet, a news and commentary website to celebrate people and companies offering sustainable, ecological solutions to clean water, energy and agriculture.

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